Pagan abroad
by WharfedaleTiger
Summary: When Robin returned from the crusades he left both freinds and enermies their, his pacifism making him a hero and a villian. Now those acquaintances are searching him out...
1. From the East

**Welcome to my first Robin Hood fanfiction. I hope you will read and enjoy, and I'd like to apolgise for any mistakes in speeling and so forth on this fiction before you read. I'd also like to put in a small disclaimer-I do not own Robin Hood or version of it.**

**This story is slightly expermental for me as I'm writing about a period I have little idea about other than basic readings, so I may have got historical details ect. wrong but I hope that won't impinge on your enjoyment of the fic. I'm not entirly happy with it either as it seems a little long winded and confusing and the structure isn't great, but there you go. Please read and review.**

It's cold here. Well, it should be of course, this far north, away from the warm sun of my homeland. Neither the less I shiver, cold shivers trickling down my to dissolve somewhere near my legs. I've tried to keep warm, wrapping myself under the layers of fabric and fleece that they use here, far more layers than Robin claims are necessary but even so I still feel the cold. My own clothes are near useless, the silks and light fabrics that where so effective in the sands of the desert proving useless here-I may as well walk around naked for all the good they do.

So I sit here in my borrowed clothes and huddle next to the small fire we've built in this cave. The others have gone out to try and find food, but I refused. I feel ill, my nose is blocked and the unrelenting shivers keep coursing through my body. Outside the snow is slowly falling and gathering up in a great drifts, like cold sand against freezing rock, only being kept at bay by the meagre heat of my fire. I've never seen snow before and I still don't trust it. I don't like the way that it disappears when you touch it, something can't be right if it disappears as soon as you try to touch it. Its nowhere near tangible enough. I prefer sand-you can trust sand.

I pull the blankets higher and think back, to the drifts of sand of the Holy Land. It's funny how our destinies are decided by our births, decided by where we were born. Had I been born a couple of miles further south I wouldn't have been a Christian, had King Baldwin not had leprosy then we would never have lost the war, had a unknown Templar Sergeant not been seized by an uncharacteristic display of charity I would have died as a child. Our destinies are tied with those of others. Had Robin of Loxley not been seized by dreams of glory then I would probably had died in Acre to a friend's sword.

I was born in the Holy Land, though in what exact year I don't know. I don't remember much of my early childhood and I'm pretty sure that I don't want to. Like any city Jerusalem has its poverty stricken areas, and it was there that I was found by a Templar Sergeant, lying in the street, near dead from starvation. They took me in, raised me, and in return I took orders and became a squire to one of their knights when I was old enough. They taught me a lot did the Templers, though I feel that I've probably broken most of my vows by now, one way or another. I fought in the siege for Jerusalem, and was freed by Saladin in another display of benevolence. Fate again I guess.

I headed north to join with Phillips Crusade whose coming had been long rumoured in the city but I ended up stumbling into King Richards and decided ended up joining one of the bands of Men-at-arms that accompanied the crusade. I met Robin there for the first time-he saved my life in Acre-and when he left the Holy Land I stayed. I don't why I stayed, perhaps I was pursuing distant longing for a home in Jerusalem but as the fighting continued and merely got deeper and more brutal I slowly saw the truth about the war. The clemency and civility-as much as you can be civil in war- of the early days had gone, replaced by something more feral and nialistic. Far from merely aiming to retake Jerusalem some crusaders now declared there ambition to destroy all Arabs. Whereas Saladin had released prisoners now stories of massacres by both sides where reported every day. To think, we had been so close to peace just a year ago.

I wanted peace, which I realised was never going to be realised in the Holy Land. If we won then I was damned by being an Arab, if the Muslims won then I was damned by my religion. It was then that my mind went back to Robin and England. I remembered his tales of a lush and peaceful land, and his offers of a bed if I ever visited him there. He never mentioned the cold, or the snow. 

But I decided to take his offer and head to Loxley to try and put the war behind me. A year later I stepped off a boat into London and began to make my way even further north.

I never realised the effect that my ethnicity would have in England, but I soon found out as I slowly made my way towards Nottingham. Pastors refused me admittance to their Churches and some denied me mass, while I got odd looks in every village I passed through-I soon learnt to try and avoid them at all costs, preferring to sleep and worship in the countryside rather than take the looks that where afforded to me when I dared walk through a settlement. This was not, however, a reaction that I encountered when I finally reached Nottinghamshire. Here the doors where already barred and shut and the populace seemed terrified without my intervention. There was something decidedly odd about the way they behaved-particularly when I enquired about Robin.

Still, I pressed on towards Loxley and what I found there was worse. Far from being the benevolent land of milk and honey this was even worse than the Holy Land. Half the houses where deserted, while one or two were burnt to the ground. As I walked through the village I didn't see a single person, though I did hear a pair of shutters bang as I wandered down what passed for the main street.

There was a large house on the hill above the village, and I presumed that must be Robins house, like the Holy Land England was feudal, which meant that you could reasonably assume that the guy in the biggest house was the most important. I climbed the hill slowly, and finally entered through the large, iron wrought door. No one greeted me there, so I pressed on, climbing a stone staircase up towards 2nd floor of the house and pushing through the door I found at the head of the stairwell-it appeared there was only one upstairs room.

As the door creaked open I heard a start from a man inside and a slither of leather on steel. "Declare yourself!" A voice shouted, so i did so, stepping out from the doors shadow and into the light that flooded through a large open window. "Dja... No." The man said and let the sword move back into its scabbard.

He was, I suppose, a tall man though not notably so, but there was something dead about him, something that drew your mind to corpses and death. His hair was black, he wore black, there was little spark in his eyes to suggest any kind of life at all. I had seen men like him before, in the Holy Land. They where the man that committed the worst atrocities, that butchered men, women and children mercilessly just for their religion or race. I knew instantly that this man would have no qualms about killing me, or torturing me, and I found it hard to believe that Robin would associate with such men.

"Who are you?" He demanded, taking a step forward. My English was not good at all; beyond a few phrases I was unable to speak the language. In the Holy Land we had all spoken French, or Arabic, and thus I was left unable to decipher his words. However, I had assembled an introductory phrase to be used in case Robin hadn't been in, so I used it. "I'm here to see Robin of Loxley." I said as clearly as I could, before repeating it. He looked at me oddly, like a predator would when its prey was slowly stumbling towards it, blinded by the light.

"Your here to see Loxley then?" He asked, taking another step forward and signalling with his left hand to someone out of the window. "Are you one of his men?" Another step.

I took a step forward into the room and moved my own hand to my swords hilt. I was scanning frantically, looking for a way out-but I was evidently too high up to jump from the window and there appeared only two exits to the room-the stairwell and a door behind the man that looked suspiciously like it would lead to a bedroom. I tried to get him to understand my linguistic difficulties, "En francais?"

He looked at me with utter contempt, "I do not understand French, or that Heathen language you babble," he said, "I suppose your one of Robins Saracen friends," There was a clatter of metal on metal in the stairwell and I edged further away, my hand on my sword hilt. I could see his hand go to his own sword as he continued on his rambling monologue. I ignored him and concentrated on the sounds coming from the stairwell. I was well aware that I only had seconds before whoever the man had summoned burst into the room.

When they did there where 3 of them, accompanied by the clanging promise of more to come. They burst through the half closed door with suitable drama and gazed around the room fearfully for their target. These where evidently soldiers who were serving out of fear rather than out of loyalty for their master. They became more keen when they saw it was I, alone, that they were called to deal with. They glanced at their master for a moment of instruction and I took this as my chance to escape.

I bolted headlong for the door at the rear of the room, drawing my sword as I ran. It was, as I had guessed a bedroom with no other door but the one I had entered from. I sprinted to the window and peered down at the same time as a bellow of rage erupted from the adjoining room. "Get him!" There was no way to get down-but I tossed my pack down just in case I managed to escape-my bow and spare clothes landing in the hay below. Then I turned and prepared to fight.

A fight is never easy to do. No matter how skilful or powerful you are you can be undone by the smallest piece of luck or mistake and then...well its curtains for you. There's a reason why numbers are often so key-because in a pitched battle there's so little space to manoeuvre that it becomes a war of attriciation- each side fighting over the bodies of the fallen. Of course, this fight wasn't going to be like that, but the numbers the man had over me meant that it was basically hopeless. My only hope was to get round them and nip through the door to escape.

This hope was shattered when they burst through the door and I realised just how many of them there was. There had to be well over 5 or 6-and more waiting outside. All were well armed and armoured, and, though callow, I realised that they had a stomach for the fight. Whatever had scared them earlier was no longer having an effect. They charged.

I managed to hold them off for a while, blocking one wild thrust by the first man with my shield and fending another with my sword. But there were too many of them and gradually they overwhelmed me, forcing me further back towards the wall till I was boxed in. There was no escape. Rough hands grabbed my at my arms, braking my grip on my weapons and forcing me onto the floor. I struggled to resist, lashing out like a savage, using every weapon at my disposal until finally my resistance was broken by a fearsome blow to my temple.


	2. Silent as the grave

**thank you too all those who read the first chapter for taking to time to have a look-and to those who favourated this work. Could i request you R&R? This part of the fic is slightly darker, overlong to my taste and contains scenes or torture, blood, guts, fighting and so forth. If you don't want to read that stuff then don't read this.**

There is probably a rule somewhere, decreed by God or Allah or someone that at some point or another of a heroes narrative he must be wake up to find himself in a prison cell, held by malicious jailers. It occurred in the tales of all my childhood heroes, and when it happened to me it seemed slightly surreal as though I had exited the real world in another, legendry one.

I looked round the cell, it was a classic of its type, low ceiling, cold stone walls and a bare stone wall. It was lit by a few flickering torches from outside the bars and I could barely see, my eyes as of yet unused to the gloom. It stunk, both of the putrid smell of deteriorating human waste and a far worse smell which seemed to overcome every corner of the room. It was the small of drying blood and suddenly I knew the sort of prison I was in.

My eyes began to adjust to the flickering light and I could take in more of the room. There was a low bench on one side, big enough for a man to lie on, which was evidently supposed to be used as a bed. Iron bars filled one side of the cell and as I moved forward I could see there were other cells lining the dungeons tunnel with indistinguishable shapes inside. The light was too dim to make out precise features but I could tell that the cells where occupied by not just men but by women and children as well. The place fell even lower in my estimation.

The cell to my left was occupied by a tall man, big by any standards. As he was closer I could just about make out his face, rugged features surrounded by a beard, I felt his glance swivel across and he took a step back. A sharp intake of breath followed by a flood of foreign babble. "Djaq? What are you doing here lass? What's happened, has the..." His voice faded as he realised that I couldn't understand a word he said and that I certainly wasn't his aquatence. He tried to talk t me a few more times, and he became particularly agitated when I mentioned Robin but communication was still virtually impossible.

After a while we fell silent and I moved away from the cell bars towards my bench and waited to see what would happen next. It was hard to tell the time in the dark, so I slept when I felt like it and ate when I was served-the food was awful. Then I noticed a sudden change in the other prisoners, a drawing back from the bars as though they had the urge to hide but could find nowhere to do so. A man had appeared in the corridor. He was silver haired, balding and dressed in black, and had a air about him that marked him out as a leader. But there was something else about him, and aura of fear and hatred that followed him and I understood why the others had drawn back. This man was a killer, a torturer. You could see it in his eyes. I began to pray that he hadn't come for me. There are many experiences in life that I wish to experience but torture is, unsurprisingly, not one of them.

Unfortunately for me he stopped in front of my cell and peered in, like an Eagle looking for a particularly elusive shrew. I could feel his eyes bore into me, looking through every scrap of my being and finding it puny and easy to break. "Who are you?" He demanded in English, his voice harsh and unyielding. It had a hint of the malevolent and insane about it and only served to reinforce my preconceptions of him. I didn't reply and he looked at me again with those dead eyes. Then he surprised me and began to speak in French, as fluent as he would have been had it been his native tongue.

"Who are you?" He demanded, again I didn't answer though I felt a flicker of recognition light in my eyes, "Let's not make this hard shall we? I know you can understand me. I know that your a crusader, I now that you've probably come here to see Robin of Loxley and that this has all been an unfortunate misunderstand that I'm sure has taken place. If you'd just tell us who you are, and what's happened and what you know about Loxley then I'm sure this can all be sorted out very quickly." That all sounded reasonable of course, and I was half tempted to reply but then I thought back to what I had seem-the way in which Loxley had been derelict, the women and children who where prisoner and the way that man had reacted when I had refused to answer him.

So I stayed silent and watched his seemingly reasonable facade slowly crumble into threats and promises of retribution. He tried various other languages that I didn't know or understand, harsh Germanic tongues and lighter Latinate ones, both of which flowed equally of his tongue. Finally he returned to French, "Still no answer, humm? Well, perhaps you are a mute then? Is that true, Arab, are you a mute son of Satan?" He turned to his guard and spoke a few words of English, gesticulating towards me. The guard unlocked the cage and stepped in, grabbing me roughly from behind and hauling my jaw open. For a moment I was too shocked to react and the man stared at my tongue.

The guard had, however, made one mistake in leaving my arms free and as soon as his grip on my neck and jaw lessened slightly I turned and struck, catching him with a firm right hand on his jaw. He stumbled backwards and I followed up with a kick to his midriff. Unfortunately his mail and leather took most of the blow but he still instinctively doubled up which allowed me to get a swift knee into his face. It rebounded with a satisfying crack and a spurt of blood. I could hear the sound of metal on metal scraping behind me and the sound of the man's voice frantically shouting orders.

I quickly whirled and moved quickly towards the cage door, slamming it shut and hearing the lock rebound into its fitting, preventing the guards from getting to me. That had brought me a minute or so anyway, as they fumbled for keys or tried to find a spare set. Behind me came a shiver of steel as the guard whose nose I had broken drew his sword and stumbled towards me, his vision blurred by tears of pain. I dodged one hurried thrust and ten another swing by falling to the floor and sweeping his legs from under his. He hit the ground with a metal clang and I gave him a quick kick in the head causing him to sag into unconsciousness.

The man was still standing there, just in front of the cage bars. It would be so easy just to reach through and spread his nose across his face. I did so, taking hold of his tunic and smashing his face with the sword pommel before letting go and watch him stumble back. He fled and I turned to the more important matter of trying to escape. I turned back to the man I had knocked out and took his helmet, and then examined his body to try and find his roll of keys. Finally I found them, there were only 3 keys on the loop so I guessed that one must unlock all the cells here.

There were three guards waiting outside the door, with the promise of more arriving in shirt notice. I had a sword and shield of course, taken off the guard I had knocked out, but even so the odds weren't great, especially in such a confined space. None the less it was a risk I would have to take, and so I tried the keys one by one until I found that the last one, typical, fitted and turned in the lock.

A majority of soldiers I fought again, or with, in the Holy Land where fanatics singularly driven in the pursuit of one goal only-victory for their religion. Many of them where veterans of many conflicts and where thus doubly dangerous, they were not frightened by what was to come and knew how to kill and over I time I too had come like that. These guards were not like that, you could see the fear in their eyes even as they tried to engage me. They were slow and waited for each other to attack before even taking a step towards me and thus I dealt with the first two swiftly despite there superior numbers and then the last one fled, presumably to raise the alarm about my escape. They where cowards at heart and they weren't keen for the fight, each waiting for the other too attack before launching forwards themselves.

Then, when they where dealt with I began to move onwards, knowing that I didn't have much time before the guard who had escaped raised the alarm. I could hear his shouts echoing around the upstairs corridors before they were abruptly silenced. I made for the heavy wooden door that led to the stairs when a shout behind me made me stop and turn. It was the big man who had tried to talk to me earlier, he was standing and rattling the cage bars. "Let us out lad, you know Robin yes? I'll take you to him. Just let us out!" I couldn't understand the words but I got the drift and the mention of Robin's name intrigued me-could this man know him. Besides, I was more likely to escape if there were many prisoners to catch and a man of his size could be useful if a fight broke out.

So I turned back and shoved my stolen key in the lock for his cage. It turned sweetly and I stepped away as the man shoved the door open and made straight for one of the bodies in order to arm himself. I then moved from cage to cage, opening each with the key. Evidently the locks weren't well designed as the same key opened each, and then the prisoners where streaming out and I suddenly realised just how many where held. I had originally estimated there numbers to be in double digits but there were far more than that-over a hundred or more of all sexes and ages.

And then they were gone, streaming up the stairs to run amok in the castle. I could hear shouts and screams above as they encountered the guards-though who were victorious I did not know. Then I noticed those who had no left, the bodies lying in the middle cells or hunched in the corners. I felt compelled by some other force to step forward, to see if I could help and suddenly the stink hit my nostrils once more. The first one I encountered was a corpse-an old man who must have starved to death some days ago judging by the extent of the decay. But the next was still alive. He was just a boy, perhaps 13 or 14 yet he was hunched like a man many times his age. His feet where blistered and burned and someone had written something in crude burns on his arm. He looked up and cowered as I came near, yet I could see no life in his eyes.

I turned quickly as I felt approaching footsteps behind me. It was the man who I had freed and he armed himself with a dead guard's sword and shied. He looked down at the boy and spoke, "poor bastard," before making a quick stab downwards. I didn't stop him-it was for the best as the boy was evidently dead to the world. I turned quickly and began to make my way out of the cell and up the stairs, trying to control the anger and revision that welled up like a cancer in my heart.

There were bodies at the top of the stair, two prisoners and two guards had been slain here, and from the look of the guards they had been mutilated afterwards, their bodies hacked and slashed to the point where they were near unrecognisable. Their weapons were gone.

We pushed on through the castle, every so often finding the bodies of those who had fallen. I could hear the sounds of battle from the east and so we headed that way, following our noses until we got to a great opening to the main courtyard. It was here the battle was afoot, the last of the prisoners desperately trying to fend off a hoard of guards who where themselves being assaulted from the rear by a odd group of men dressed in green. I recognised the leader of that group and evidently the man next to me did as well for we both roared the same exclamation as one "Robin!"

We plunged into the melee, anxious to make our way across towards Robin and his men, the man using his great strength to batter the enemy into submission and I using my speed and experience to twist out of the way of the incoming blows and to meld out death in equal quantities. The numbers of guards appeared to be thinning and then it became a full-blown rout, with the mailed men heading for any exit they could find.

We met in the centre of the field, the surviving prisoners, myself and the man and Robins men. He didn't recognise me at first did Robin, my face being hidden by the helmet I was wearing and he later claimed that he saw thought I was just another prisoner. There was little time for formal greetings as though Robins men rejoiced at the arrival of my companion, whom they called John, we had to make good our escape.

Robin and his men had got inside the compound through grappling hooks on the eastern wall and so we made our way there, virtually unopposed by any but the most suicidal guards. And thus we made good our escape, abseiling down the walls and heading into the depths of the forest.

**I'm afraid that chapter 3 might take slightly longer to formulate, (a few reviews might speed the process ;) ) but I should have it up by the end of may. Thanks for reading.**


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